in 2006, he moved to the United States to pursue graduate studies at the University of Wisconsin, obtaining his Ph.D in mathematics (differential geometry) in 2010.

[4] Sun worked as a research associate at Imperial College London before becoming an assistant professor at Stony Brook University in 2013.

[7] In January 2024, it was revealed that he had returned to China and joined the Institute for Advanced Study in Mathematics (IASM) at Zhejiang University.

[9] The conjecture was later given a precise formulation by Donaldson, based in part on earlier work by Gang Tian.

The solution found by Chen, Donaldson and Sun was published in the Journal of the American Mathematical Society in 2015 as a holistic three-article series, "Kähler–Einstein metrics on Fano manifolds, I, II and III".